


A Breath of Highly Perfumed Air

by Mireille



Series: Fresh Air [1]
Category: due South
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-05-23
Updated: 2005-05-23
Packaged: 2018-08-20 07:03:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8240423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mireille/pseuds/Mireille
Summary: Bad coffee and Francesca Vecchio, two things that keep Welsh awake.





	

**Author's Note:**

> HUGE thanks go to msdori, who convinced me of this pairing years ago and has probably been patiently waiting for me to write it ever since.

Welsh missed his coffee.  
  
He had no problem admitting that it was terrible coffee, oily and bitter and strong enough that it would probably eat through a Styrofoam cup if you let it sit long enough. He was sure it had eaten through his stomach lining, no matter who he was blaming this week for the bottle of Maalox he kept in his desk drawer.  
  
He missed it anyway. Francesca claimed that the cappuccino machine delivered just as much caffeine in a better-tasting package, and she was probably right. It wasn't the caffeine that woke him up in the morning, though; it was the taste of that god-awful coffee. You couldn't drift off to sleep at your desk with that taste in your mouth. In fact, if he didn't brush his teeth at night, he'd probably never go to sleep again, just thanks to the lingering taste of his morning coffee.  
  
So no matter how thrilled everyone else was about that damned cappuccino maker, he wanted the old coffee pot back.  
  
Of course, coffee wasn't the only thing that kept him alert; it was just the only thing that he was going to publicly admit to.  
  
Other things prevented him from falling asleep at his desk, even those mornings after he'd left his office after midnight and came back before seven. Things like Francesca Vecchio and the non-regulation, entirely too short, shirt she wore with her Civilian Aid uniform.  
  
Yelling at her about it was one explanation for that. He couldn't sleep while he was blowing a gasket over her refusal to follow directions.  
  
Watching her was another. Her pants weren't regulation, either; too snug over the curve of her hip, and clinging to her like a second skin as she leaned over Ray's desk to say something to the Mountie. Welsh realized he was staring at the exposed stretch of golden skin on her lower back, decided he should have closed the blinds on his office window that morning, and started chaining paper clips together to give him something else to pay attention to.  
  
Francesca was going to drive him crazy before too much longer. She was like… she was like her brother, to be honest, except for having no apparent aptitude at all for police work. And, of course, being an extremely pretty young woman. But she was every bit as annoying. Maybe even more so, because at least Vecchio had known it wasn't called a "pop sheet."  
  
On the other hand, she was a lot more pleasant to have around than, say, Dewey, even if she didn't understand police procedure, or the English language, or the concept of a dress code. Then again, most people were more pleasant to have around than Dewey. It didn't mean that he thought of Francesca Vecchio as a breath of fresh air around the place.  
  
More like extremely annoying, highly perfumed air. Not the kind of perfume she needed to be wearing to work, either; it was far too strong, far too sexy. It was for the Mountie's benefit, of course; not that Fraser was ever going to do anything but pretend not to notice, if he hadn't by now.  
  
So Francesca was never going to get anywhere with the Mountie, and she had to know that. And, well, Welsh had been divorced for a couple of years now, and it had been a while--not that long, but a couple of months--since he'd had much in the way of a personal life. So perhaps it was perfectly natural that he'd notice Francesca. She was going out of her way to be noticed, after all, even if it wasn't his attention that she wanted.  
  
She was a Civilian Aid at his precinct, though, and that put her off limits. Unless she didn't want to be off limits, in which case he could make a few phone calls and get her transferred to one of the other precincts in this part of the city. If she didn't want to be off limits, he'd want her in another precinct anyway, ethical considerations or not, because he, personally, didn't want any woman he was interested in to get within fifty yards of the Mountie. He'd seen what Fraser did to women.  
  
Not that he thought Francesca was interested, mind you. Not in anyone but the Mountie. Definitely not in someone twice her age, who'd been her brother's boss for years. She liked annoying him, and that was as far as it went.  
  
That was as far as he wanted it to go, because she really did annoy him. She just didn't listen to anything he said, never mind that he was supposed to be her boss. Entirely too much like Vecchio.  
  
That was another thing. She was Ray Vecchio's little sister, and no one who had seen Vecchio go ballistic all over the place when he thought she'd slept with the Mountie could think he wasn't protective of her, no matter how loudly he'd always bitched about her. Vecchio wasn't here for Welsh to talk to about it, either--no matter how firmly he insisted that Kowalski was Vecchio, for all intents and purposes, it didn't stretch that far.  
  
He couldn't do that to Vecchio. Hell, Vecchio was a lot like the son he'd never had--not his actual son, who'd made the dean's list at the U of I last term, and had decided he was going to be pre-med, which actually made the tuition bills seem worthwhile, but the one he didn't have, the one who screwed up a lot even though he always meant well, and brought annoying but ultimately harmless friends around, and generally caused him to pull out his hair.  
  
All right, so Vecchio was like the son he was glad he didn't actually have, but still. There was a certain paternal feeling toward Vecchio. Toward any of his detectives that he'd worked with for that long, but Vecchio was the only one in question at the moment. And so, apart from the age difference, that was another reason for him to think twice about ever approaching Francesca.  
  
If he ever wanted to, which would require her to stop being annoying, so it was probably never going to happen. At least not in his lifetime.  
  
"I shouldn't even give you this file," Francesca said, seeming to appear out of nowhere, and if he'd had a cup of bad coffee, he'd probably have spilled it all over himself.  
  
"Knock, Francesca," he muttered.  
  
"You didn't even ask for it. Just yelled at me about it. You know, if you don't learn to relax, you're going to give yourself a heart attack. My uncle Nunzio--"  
  
"Francesca," he said, trying to get a grasp on his temper. "There are no words for how much I don't need to hear about your uncle Nunzio."  
  
"What about this?" she said, waving the folder in front of him. He didn't reach for it; knowing her, she'd probably hold it out of reach until he said "please."  
  
"Just put it on my desk," he growled, and was pleasantly surprised that she did.  
  
"Fine. But when you drop dead in your office, I'm not going to be responsible."  
  
"Oh, yes, you are."  
  
"You know, if you keep talking to me this way, Huey can pass on his own messages."  
  
That got his attention. Huey had been in one of the interview rooms with a particularly stubborn witness all morning. "What did Huey say?"  
  
Francesca leaned on his desk; the movement pulled her still too-short uniform shirt up, exposing that stripe of skin again. Definitely not regulation. And neither were her earrings, which were long and gold and flashy, or the bangle pushed halfway up her arm, and it wasn't just that her shirt was too short, she also had managed to make it lower-cut than it ought to be. A lot lower.  
  
Welsh looked down at the folder she'd given him, because that was the professional thing to do.  
  
"Huey said the guy's singing like a parakeet."  
  
"Canary," Welsh corrected her, and he was starting to think that she did this on purpose to make him crazy, because no one could be that clueless. Even Vecchio's sister.  
  
"Parakeet, canary, blue jay, who cares?" she said, laughing a little, and there he was, looking up at her again and not thinking that she was irritating, just noticing olive skin and huge dark eyes and full lips, and women really shouldn't go around smelling that nice, because it just got guys who'd been trying to get some work done into serious trouble.  
  
She was still leaning on the desk, because Francesca was always leaning on something--always posing, he thought, like she needed to pose to be attractive, and for a moment, he thought she might be flirting with him.  
  
And then he reminded himself that if she was, it was only because flirting was something Francesca Vecchio did about as often as breathing, and so it didn't count.  
  
Even if he managed to get past the whole thing where she was young enough to be his daughter--where her brother was one of his… well, no, he wasn't calling Vecchio one of his protégés; he had some pride. But still. Even if he managed to get past the thing where she was Ray Vecchio's kid sister, it was pretty likely that she wouldn't get past it. Francesca liked good-looking, heroic young guys, not rumpled middle-aged lieutenants who grumbled when people tried to give them cappuccino instead of the bad coffee they were used to.  
  
"I care. Go pretend to do some work," he said, frowning up at her, and was disappointed when, for once, she did what he asked.


End file.
